‘‘ Guajiro Sonero’’

Album description

The Cuban son has
long been considered to be Cuba’s national music and dance genre because of its
relatively “equal” incorporation of Spanish and African musical elements—which
corresponds to the idealized Cuban citizen within the nationalist hybridity
discourse. Son is
generally thought to have emerged from rural eastern Cuba in the mid-19th
century and to have migrated to Havana around 1910. There is no consensus
among Cuban musicologists about the identity of the main agents who
brought son to
Havana and western Cuba; possible agents of dissemination include eastern Cuban
soldiers sent to Havana, eastern Cuban musicians, and eastern Cuban migrant
agricultural workers. Once son reached
Havana, it began evolving in terms of formal structure and instrumentation, in
part because it came into contact with other Afro-Cuban music and dance genres
that had emerged in western Cuba, namely, the percussion and song genre
called rumba. Son reached its
apotheosis of popularity in the 1930s and 1940s and was exported to the world
as “rumba” in 1930 with Don Azpiazu’s performance of “El
Manicero” in New York. It was resurrected in the 1990s with Wim Wender’s Buena Vista Social Club documentary
and related recording projects. In contemporary Cuba, while son has not been a
popular (i.e., mass-mediated) genre for over 60 years, it is impossible to
visit any part of Cuba without hearing “Son”.